2010–2011 Graduate Collaboration Grant Awardees
The 2011 awards serve eighteen Graduate Students from six disciplines. Grants are made possible through the support of the Office of Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories.
“An Iconography of Contagion”
Clare Rosean (Visual Arts) and Marie Adachi, Xuan Han, Erica MacKenzie, Bailey Miles, Alex Ruby, and Neha Sathe (Pritzker School of Medicine)
Faculty Sponsors: Laura Letinsky (Visual Arts) and Dr. Elizabeth Kieff (Medicine)
A team of medical students and an artist will produce a paperback book in the style of a graphic novel that integrates science and art to convey scientific concepts about the flu virus through creative illustrations. This publication titled, “Viral Combat: Monica Fights the Flue,” will then be distributed to schools and centers throughout the Southside community, hoping to spark a new community-wide interest in scientific concepts, medical issues, and their modes of representation through artistic expression. The contents of this book will also become an online series.
“The Role of Vibrotactile Input in Musical Performance”
Jonathan DeSouza (Music) and Shannon Heald and Stephen Hedger (Psychology)
Faculty Sponsors: Berthold Hoeckner (Music) and Howard Nusbaum (Psychology)
PhD students’ Heald, Hedger (psychology), and DeSouza (music) pose the question: How might phenomena like the McGurk effect change the performance of a musicians, who relies on both tactile and auditory sensory information to fine-tune their performance? “The Role of Vibrotactile Input in Musical Performance,” will explore how sources of tactile feedback, such as vibration, influence a musician’s performance. The team’s experiment will distort a performer’s expected levels of vibration feedback, possibly suggesting new, non-auditory avenues of sensorial engagement for musicians. The research results will contribute to dissertations and publications.
“Untitled Video Installation”
Marc Miskin (Physics) and Amy Stebbins (Germanic Studies/Theater)
Faculty Sponsors: David Levin (Germanic Studies) and Heinrich Jaeger (Physics)
This team will use a physicist’s tools of inquiry to create a deeper understanding of the craft of acting by exploring the possibility alternative meanings that might be found in facial expressions by capturing actors’ faces in fine-grained temporal detail – 3,000 frames per second, to be exact. The pair aims to demonstrate how important time is in how we interpret facial semiotics and evaluate emotional authenticity. The project will record the faces of actresses responding to emotional stimuli with advanced high-speed cameras, distilling the fleeting micro-moments of facial expressions that would be otherwise imperceptible. The project will culminate in a video installation demonstrating their findings.
“Visual Art and Medicine: Using Art to Explore the Practice of Medicine”
Jacqueline Hendrickson (Visual Arts) and Nicole Baltrushes, Celine Goetz, and Laura Hodges (Pritzker School of Medicine)
Faculty Sponsors: Dr. Joel Schwab (Medicine) and Katherine Desjardins (Visual Arts)
Students from the Pritzker School of Medicine and Department of Visual Arts will explore these two disciplines modes of thinking in an elective course for Medical students titled, “Visual Art and Medicine: Using Art to Explore the Practice of Medicine,” to explore how the process of artistic inquiry can enhance the instincts and skills of medical scientists. This course will take place over eight-session for medical students, engaging student with drawing the figure, lectures in visual practices, and guided art museum visits, with the intention of identify ways in which the visualization and verbal articulation skills of the medical students might be honed by artistic modes of thought. This will culminate in an exhibition artwork of these medical students.